In recent years, Mexican food has quickly become a highly popular choice of international cuisine throughout the United States. The broad appeal and rapid growth of the Mexican food industry has created a desire by individual consumers and businesses to prepare Mexican food without expending a great deal of time or effort.
For many hundreds of years, tortillas have been hand-made by the indigenous peoples of the locales that are now known as Mexico and Central America. Initially, the time consuming and laborious task of hand making tortillas began with grinding corn into a meal that is then used to form balls of dough. Each tortilla must be formed by hand from a ball of dough into the familiar flat disc-like shape that is then cooked. This is typically accomplished by manually pressing or "patting" out the dough between the maker's two hands. The advent of the Spanish Conquest introduced flour for making tortillas which involved the same process as described above for making, preparing and cooking tortillas by hand.
Tortillas are a basic element in most Mexican meals, just as bread is in other cuisines. Often, several tortillas are consumed at any given meal by a particular person. This has presented a problem of being able to conveniently make enough tortillas for the meal without expending a great deal of time and effort when employing these traditional methods. Attempts to mechanize tortilla making have been introduced as Mexican food has grown in popularity.